The Silent Touchline: The Decline of the Traditional Winger in Modern Football

One afternoon at Trigoria, AS Roma's training ground, an eighteen-year-old player stood for a long time beside the touchline. He placed the ball on the grass, took three steps back, drew a deep breath, and crossed. The ball curved over the defender's head and dropped into the gap between goalkeeper and centre-back — a classic cross that any coach of the 1990s would have nodded at with approval. But the assistant standing beside me simply shook his head: "No, not like that. You have to cut inside and finish with your left foot." The boy nodded, and the next cross was no longer a cross at all. When the ground is empty of people, I hear the breathing of the match clearly — and that afternoon, that breathing sounded like a goodbye.

I have followed Serie A clubs for more than forty years. I once stood in the Olimpico stands as a young reporter, once sat in press rooms listening to coaches explain the 4-4-2 as an inviolable doctrine. In those days, the winger was a clear and glorious profession: run down the touchline, beat the full-back, whip the ball into the box. The entire formation was designed to serve exactly that moment. Names like Garrincha or Jairzinho of Brazilian football — my homeland — were the embodiment of that player: glued to the touchline, spinning defenders dizzy. At the 2026 World Cup in Mexico, Jairzinho scored in all six of Brazil's matches on the way to the title — a record still unbroken, and powerful proof of what a goalscoring right winger can do.

Today, walking into any training centre in Europe, I see the opposite. Wingers no longer run to the flanks; they run inside. And a position once regarded as the soul of attacking football is quietly being erased from the tactical map. This is a season of major tournaments, when national teams compress every emotion into a few matches, and I realise that even on the grandest stage, the pure winger is close to extinction.

Italian football is a painful example. A national team that has won the World Cup four times failed to qualify for the 2026 finals, losing to Sweden in the play-off, then missed 2026 as well after defeat to North Macedonia. People blame many things: a lack of creativity, an ageing squad, a rigid style. But few notice that Italian football has also lost the winger who once made its name.

To understand why this happened, one must look at the data. Over two decades, the average number of crosses per match in Europe's top leagues has fallen by nearly half. At the same time, shots from the inside channel — where wingers cut in — have surged. Analysts point out that a cross converts into a goal with very low probability, while a shot from a favourable position inside the box is far more valuable. When data became the common language of coaching rooms, wingers were forced to relearn themselves.

The core point I want to stress: the inverted winger is not merely a tactical variant, but the inevitable consequence of space optimisation. When modern full-backs push high and seize the flank, the winger is freed from the touchline to step into the gaps between the lines — where he becomes a more direct threat. The system works so smoothly that it becomes the standard. A team without an inverted winger is deemed outdated.

In Serie A this season, I counted no fewer than fifteen teams using inverted wide pairs: left-footers on the right, right-footers on the left. This trend is no longer an individual choice of a few stars, but the norm of an entire generation. One coach once told me, half-joking, that if he fielded a pure winger, the staff would ask whether he was deliberately playing vintage football.

The modern inverted winger has a classic archetype: Arjen Robben of the Netherlands, with his golden left foot and his habit of cutting in from the right and finishing with his left. Throughout his Bayern Munich career, Robben made every defender know exactly what he would do and still fail to stop it. Around the same time, Mohamed Salah at Liverpool perfected the same model, but with even more frightening pace and scoring instinct. Their success became a syllabus: every young winger now dreams of cutting inside and scoring, rather than running to the flank and crossing.

Alongside this, the full-back role has changed too. From attacking full-backs like Cafu and Roberto Carlos, football moved toward the modern full-back allowed to push forward almost continuously. Once the full-back took on the task of stretching the pitch's width, the winger ahead of him had no reason to hug the line. The two positions swapped functions, and in that swap, the pure winger became surplus.

Notably, this change is not confined to club level. In national teams, where training time is scarce and the pressure for immediate results is intense, coaches lean even more toward safe, easily copied solutions. They borrow club models wholesale and inadvertently turn every team into a copy of each other. In that setting, a traditional winger — one who needs space, time, and a system that exploits the width of the pitch — becomes a luxury few dare to invest in.

But I want to return to that afternoon at Trigoria. The eighteen-year-old crossed beautifully. That is a skill. And I wonder: what happens if we discard a skill merely because it no longer fits the optimised model? Screens flicker constantly, yet the ball still rolls to the old rhythm — a rhythm only those who have watched football long enough can feel. At a training ground, I once came across a young player crying over a misplaced pass. But the greater sorrow I witnessed was a traditional winger being asked to change his game entirely — and not understanding why the very thing that once made him shine was now deemed wrong.

There is a common misunderstanding I want to point out. Many believe the disappearance of the traditional winger proves football has evolved, that the old must inevitably be discarded. I do not believe so. I believe we have confused average optimisation with absolute value. Data tells us a cross has a low scoring probability, but it does not tell us what happens when opponents have grown far too accustomed to defending against the inverted winger.

That is the blind spot. When every team plays the same way, the tactical advantage vanishes. A pure winger, able to beat his man with pace and deliver an accurate cross, becomes a surprise weapon precisely because he has become rare. Football is a sport of confrontation, not of uniformity. Erasing the traditional winger is not progress; it is a naive narrowing of our technical capital.

I have seen the same thing across the decades. There was a time when people declared the tall striker would go extinct. There was a time when they said the sweeper would vanish. But football always finds a way to revive what has been forgotten, because every weapon has its moment. The traditional winger is not wrong. It is simply that modern coaches are so busy with models that they forget that sometimes, victory lies where no one expects it. The stands are louder now, but I miss the noise of the days before mobile phones — the noise of roars that erupted when a winger beat two defenders and crossed onto a striker's head.

I am nearly sixty, yet the kick-off whistle still makes me ninety minutes younger every time. And in those ninety minutes, I still believe some young player will dare to stand by the touchline, deliver a truly beautiful cross, and prove that memory is not something to be buried. Everyone speaks quickly these days, but football needs people who listen slowly — people patient enough to recognise the value of a skill before it disappears entirely. The question for coaches is not whether the traditional winger still works, but whether they have the courage to give him a chance.